Friday, April 28, 2017

SEIU President
Mary Kay Henry is placing yet
another local union under trusteeship.

On April 26,
2017, Henry removed SEIU Nevada’s top two officers -- President Cherie Mancini and Executive Vice President
Sharon Kisling -- from office,
according to a two-page
internal letter signed by Henry and an announcement on SEIU Nevada’s website.

Also on April 26, two SEIU officials (Neal Bisno and Deedee Fitzpatrick,
Henry’s Deputy Chief of Staff) met privately with SEIU Nevada’s executive board
at Henry’s request. The next day, April 27, SEIU Nevada’s website announced
that its board had voted to place the local union under trusteeship. Here’s an
excerpt:

Last night, our executive board met with
representatives of SEIU to consider the future of the local… After a thoughtful and extensive discussion,
the executive board voted to ask SEIU to help return our local to those roots
by taking Local 1107 into trusteeship.
The local’s request is now pending with International President Mary Kay
Henry and we expect a decision soon.

Henry’s
April 26 letter also announced the appointment of two of her representatives (Steve Ury and Kathy Eddy) to serve as “monitors” of SEIU Nevada.

SEIU Nevada
is the fourth SEIU local union to be placed in trusteeship or under “monitorship”
in recent months.

In August of
2016, SEIU imposed an emergency trusteeship on SEIU
Local 73 in Chicago. In December of 2016, Henry removed the
president of Los Angeles-based SEIU
Local 99 and placed the union under the control of an SEIU-appointed “monitor,”
Eliseo Medina. On February 14, 2017,
Henry placed SEIU
Healthcare Michigan under an “emergency trusteeship” amid allegations of
financial corruption.

Friday, April 21, 2017

Should SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan earn more than the international presidents of the United Auto Workers at the United Steel Workers?

Doesn’t make
sense, right?

After all, Leo Gerard (USW) and Dennis Williams (UAW) lead
international unions with four to six times as many members as Regan’s local
union in California. In 2016, the UAW had 415,963 members while the USW had
548,033.

Nonetheless,
that didn’t stop “Wall Street” Dave Regan from pocketing a higher salary in 2016,
according to the unions’ DOL Forms LM-2.

In fact, SEIU-UHW’s
second-highest paid official, Dave
Kieffer, also earned more than the USW’s Gerard and the UAW’s Williams.

Here’s a
rundown of their pay, according to Forms LM-2:

Dave Regan, SEIU-UHW President: $224,706

Dave Kieffer, SEIU-UHW Director of
Governmental Relations: $210,909

Leo Gerard, International President of United
Steelworkers: $207,289

Dennis Williams, International
President of United Auto Workers: $184,159

SEIU-UHW's David Kieffer

A quick
glance through SEIU-UHW’s recently filed disclosure report reveals that ten
SEIU-UHW officials pocketed more than $150,000 during 2016. The list is below.

And take a
look at their job descriptions.

Is it
really necessary for one local union to have a Director of Governmental
Relations, a Director of Public Affairs, a Director of Healthcare Policy and
Advocacy, and a Political Director -- all earning more than $150K a year?

Dave Regan,
President: $224,706

Dave
Kieffer, Director of Governmental Relations:
$210,909

Kathy Ochoa,
Director of Healthcare Policy and Advocacy: $179,572

Stan Lyles,
Vice President: $176,230

Steve Trossman,
Director of Public Affairs: $170,494

David
Miller, Assistant to the President for Strategic Campaigns: $168,974

Myriam
Escamilla, Hospital Division Director: $162,415

Greg
Pullman, Chief of Staff: $153,980

Chokri
Bensaid, Kaiser Division Director: $152,860

Cass
Gualvez, Organizing Director: $152,521

Arianna
Jimenez, Political Director: $152,227

Glad there are unions like NUHW, whose constitution speaks volumes about the union's democratic values by prohibiting the union's president from earning more than the highest-paid rank-and-file member.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

In Nevada, SEIU’s
f*ck-ups continue unabated, according to press reports and a recently released letter
authored by one faction inside the 9,000-member local union.

Meanwhile, some of
the state’s largest employers are taking full advantage of SEIU’s dysfunction
to deny workers pay increases and strip them of union representation.

Tasty
earlier reported on the circus-like show gripping SEIU Nevada (also known
as SEIU Local 1107), including dueling “internal charges” filed by the union’s
President and Executive Vice President alleging violations of SEIU’s
constitution and bylaws.

Last August,
police were called to the union’s offices when the union’s Executive Vice
President (Sharon Kisling) allegedly chased and threatened one of the union’s
staff directors in what he called “a two-and-a-half-hour reign of terror at our
office.”

In October,
SEIU’s International Executive Board (IEB) held two days of hearings at the Circus
Circus Casino to investigate the purple sh*t show. According to an April
12 article in the Las Vegas
Review-Journal, the IEB has not issued any results from its hearing. (Michael
Scott Davidson, “Impasse
Latest Sign of Trouble for Clark County’s Largest Employee Union,” April
12, 2017).

So here’s
the latest.

On March 31,
2017, eight officers of SEIU Nevada’s unit of 5,000 workers employed by Clark
County sent a letter to SEIU President Mary Kay Henry “expressing our concern
for our local and especially our members.” The letter concludes with this appeal:

This local is broken and needs you. Please,
please, please do the right thing and hold President Mancini and this local responsible
for taking care of our membership which is where the focus should always be.

The letter
focuses on problems SEIU Nevada is facing in its contract negotiations with
Clark County, which reportedly employs a majority of the local union’s members.
Last week, negotiations reached impasse.

According to
the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “If a
deal is not struck by July 1, when the current contract expires, the county
says it will halt scheduled wage and benefit increases for unionized employees
until a new contract is agreed upon.”

Here’s an
excerpt from the eight officers’ letter to Henry (full copy is below):

We feel the necessity to let you know that
we do not believe that we will have a contract in place by July and we are
very, very concerned that we are not being heard and this is even more obvious
by President Mancini's actions. With only one (1) organizer working for the
County membership, he is being setup for failure. One individual cannot reach
4,000+ members that reside in a County of over 8,000 square miles.

The leadership within the Clark County unit
are informing you that we cannot continue in the same direction we are today.
The negativity, in-fighting, retaliation, blatant disregard for fellow
officers, etc. has got to stop. We have waited patiently since November 1, 2016
for the results of the hearings held on October 30 and 31, 2016 and we can't
wait any longer. We need to know the results so they are not being held over
our heads. There is no reason that we should feel that you, the SEIU
International Officers, are ignoring our continued pleas for help.

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry

Everyday that we draw closer to July 1,
2017, the closer we are to having a membership that is no longer willing to
believe in SEIU. They will give themselves a raise by dropping the union that
is no longer fulfilling their needs. We are barely over the 50% membership and
we are willing to bet that if we drop below that mark, Clark County Management
will be convinced to follow in the footsteps of the hospitals being represented
by the same union that are currently under the microscope to prove their membership numbers to keep the status of the members union.

Last month,
two Las Vegas hospitals unilaterally withdrew recognition of SEIU Nevada after alleging
that a majority of the hospitals’ 1,000 Registered Nurses signed cards indicating
they no longer wished to be represented by SEIU, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. (Michael Scott
Davidson, “Second
Las Vegas Hospital Severs Ties with Union,” March 13, 2017).

The effort
to remove SEIU was aided by the right-wing National
Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. SEIU has filed charges against the
hospitals. According to the Review-Journal, SEIU's labor contracts for registered nurses at both hospitals expired in May of
2016 and successor contracts have not been negotiated since then.

Friday, April 7, 2017

A California
hospital worker named Starla Rollins
has taken a fight to protect 15,000 workers' pension benefits all the way to the US Supreme Court.

Last week, Rollins’
attorneys asked the Supreme Court to safeguard the retirement benefits of tens of
thousands of workers at Dignity Health,
a giant hospital company headquartered in San Francisco.

Even though Dignity’s
pension plan covers more than 15,000 SEIU-UHW members, SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan and other SEIU-UHW
officials have refused to lift a finger to defend workers’ pensions.

Here’s
what’s going on:

In 2009
and 2012,
SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan and Hal
Ruddick teamed up with Dignity executives to implement sharp cuts to
the pension plan covering SEIU-UHW members at more than 30 hospitals across
California.

Then, in
2013, Starla Rollins -- a 26-year Ward Clerk at Community Hospital of San Bernardino -- discovered that SEIU-UHW officials had allowed Dignity to
underfund SEIU-UHW members’ pension plan by $1.2 billion. (Yes, that’s a “b”
for “billion.”)

Because SEIU-UHW
officials refused to do anything, Rollins decided to sue Dignity in a
class-action lawsuit on behalf of herself and her co-workers. Her lawsuit -- “Starla
Rollins v. Dignity Health”-- was filed in 2013. Tasty covered it in this
earlier post.

Here’s the
latest.

Last July, Rollins
and her attorney won an important victory in federal court after doing battle
with Dignity’s high-priced lawyers for three years. (See below the decision
issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.)

Dignity, rather than accepting
defeat, appealed the court’s decision to the US Supreme Court.

Last week,
lawyers for both sides argued their case in front of the Supreme Court.

Starla Rollins

The case
centers on the following question: A federal law (the Employee Retirement
Income Security Act) requires corporations to adequately fund their employees’ pensions
so workers actually receive the pension payments they earned when they retire.

Dignity acknowledges it has underfunded workers’ pension. But company
executives claim they’re exempt from federal law because Dignity is a
“religious organization” …even though Dignity has bought up many non-religious
hospitals. It even changed its name from “Catholic Healthcare West” so it could
re-brand itself as a non-religious company.

What
happened during last week’s oral argument at the US Supreme Court?

According to
a transcript
(see copy below), Judge Sonia Sotomayor
grilled a lawyer representing Dignity. Here’s an excerpt from her questioning:

[Dignity is] the fifth largest healthcare
provider in the nation. They have 60,000 employees. Do you believe that
Congress's vision was to let, what is essentially, a corporate entity opt out
of protecting all of those employees?

Kick their
asses!

So what
happens next?

The Supreme
Court justices will publish their decision sometime in June.

What about
SEIU-UHW? It continues to do absolutely nothing to protect its members’
retirement benefits. Apparently, “Wall Street” Dave Regan is too busy polishing
the CEO’s shoes.

So... huge
props to Starla!

In fact, Rollins has been waging not one but two important legal battles against SEIU-UHW for its failure to support its
members.

In the
second case, Rollins won a
giant victory last October when a federal court ordered officials from both
SEIU-UHW and Dignity Health to stand trial for illegally laying her off from
her 26-year job and then refusing to honor her union contract’s seniority
agreement. Rollins was part of the union’s leadership team prior to SEIU’s 2009
trusteeship, when NUHW President Sal Rosselli led the union.

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